Do paypal and dwolla have physical POS methods that don't rely on VISA or mastercard? Maybe I'm missing something. That canadian mint thing sounds like a citizen tracking collar to me. It'll be a disaster of human rights and a disaster of identity theft. I don't think Canada is really the ideal market for bitcoin anyway.
Dwolla basically has mobile web payments, so I guess there isn't any hardware involved. And Paypal apparently uses standard mag stripe cards. So perhaps not.